Random Access: Photographs by John T. Hill

John T. Hill is a graphic designer, author and photographer. He taught both graphic design and photography at the Yale University School of Art, co-founded Yale's Department of Photography and was its first co-director of graduate studies. Hill's current focus is on book and exhibition design, and writing. Two of his book designs were selected for the AIGA 50 Books of the Year Award. During his 19-year tenure as executor of the Walker Evans Estate, Hill produced a number of Evans books and exhibitions including Walker Evans: At Work, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye, Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary and Walker Evans: Depth of Field. Other books he has designed, authored or co-authored include Calder by Matter, W. Eugene Smith Photographs, Edward Weston, Forms of Passion and May Day at Yale: Recollections 1970.

Random Access is a collection of John T. Hill's photographs taken over 70 years, showing the remarkable scope and empathy of his vision. Hill's consistent focus over the decades has been what he calls "found compositions," recording "chance happenings that strike a personal chord." From a street scene in São Paulo in 1958 to the interior of a Queens taxi in 1970, from John F. Kennedy at the podium of a 1960 rally to punks in Trafalgar Square, from Walker Evans' home to recent landscapes and still lifes, his work is democratic, curious, all-embracing. Hill celebrates the contradictions and imperfections of his subjects, engages but never sentimentalizes, and is careful to never impose a singular interpretation onto the viewer. Here is none of the self-congratulation of "Look at what only I can see," but rather an open invitation for the viewer of "This is what you are also capable of seeing."